[107] Lecky, ``History of European Morals,'' Vol. 1, p. 359.
Does any sane man imagine that the Church could cease to be missionary and remain a Church? It has been well said that the Christian nations might as well face the utter futility of any hypothesis based upon the supposition that they can remain away from the Orient. The occurrences of recent years have made changes in their relation to the world which they can no more recall than they can alter the course of a planet. It is idle for doctrinaires to tell us from the quiet comfort of home libraries, that we should ``keep hands off.'' We can no more keep hands off than our country could keep hands off slavery in the South, no more than New York could keep hands off a borough infected with smallpox. The world has passed the point where one-third of its population can be allowed to breed miasma which the other two-thirds must breathe. Both for China's sake and for our own, we must continue this work. If this is true in the political and commercial realms, much more is it true in the religious. Chalmer's notable sermon on the ``Expulsive Power of a New Affection'' enunciates a permanent principle. When a man's soul is once thrilled with the conviction that he has found God, he must declare that sublime truth,
``To doubt would be disloyalty,
To falter would be sin.''
I confess to a feeling of impatience when I am told that all missionary plans for China must be contingent ``upon the settlement of political negotiations,'' ``the overthrow of the Empress Dowager and her reactionary advisers,'' ``the reestablishment of the Emperor on his rightful throne,'' ``the continuance in power of Viceroy Yuan Shih Kai,'' ``the mainte- nance of a strong foreign military and naval force in China,'' ``the thwarting of Russia's plans for supremacy,'' and several other events.
All these things have been said and more. Is the Church then despairingly to resign her commission from Jesus Christ and humbly ask a new one from Caesar? Not so did the apostolic missionaries, and not so, I am persuaded, will their modern successors do. They cannot, indeed, be indifferent to the course of political events or to their bearing upon the missionary problem. But, on the other hand, they cannot make their obedience to Christ and their duty to their fellow men dependent upon political considerations. For Christian men to wait until China is pacified by the Powers, or ``until she is enlightened by the dissemination of truer conceptions of the Western world,'' would be to abdicate their responsibility as the chief factor in bringing about a better state of affairs. Is the Church prepared to abandon the field to the diplomat, the soldier, the trader? How soon is China likely to be pacified by them, judging from their past acts? The gospel is the primary need of China to-day, not the tertiary. The period of unrest is not the time for the messenger of Christ to hold his peace, but to declare with new zeal and fidelity his ministry of reconciliation. To leave the field to the politician, the soldier and the trader would be to dishonour Christ, to fail to utilize an unprecedented opportunity, to abandon the Chinese Christians in their hour of special need and to prejudice missionary influence at home and abroad for a generation.
But the numbers at work are painfully inadequate. To say that there are 2,950 Protestant foreign missionaries in China is apt to give a distorted idea of the real situation unless one remembers the immensity of the population. A station is considered well-manned when it has four families and a couple of single women. But what are they among those swarming myriads? The proportion of Protestant missionaries to the population, which is commonly quoted, needs revision. There is one to about every 144,000 souls. But that, too, requires modification, for it counts the sick, the aged, recruits who are learning the language, wives whose time is absorbed by household cares, and those who are absent on furloughs, the last class alone being often about ten per cent. of the total enrollment. The actual working force, therefore, is far smaller than the statistics suggest.
Of China as a whole, it is said that ``some of the missionaries and some of the converts are to be found in every one of the provinces, both of China and Manchuria. But in the 1,900 odd counties into which the provinces are divided, each with one important town and a large part of them with more than one, there are but some 400 stations. That is to say, at least four-fifths of the counties of China are almost entirely unprovided with the means of hearing the gospel.''[108] Of all the walled cities in the Empire, less than 300 are occupied by missionaries. There are literally tens of thousands of communities that have not yet been touched by the gospel. Plainly, the missionary force must be largely augmented if the work is to be adequately done. The home churches have gone too far to stop without going farther. ``Those who undertake to carry on mission work among great peoples undertake great responsibilities. We have no right to penetrate these nations with a revolutionary gospel of enormous power, unless we are prepared to make every sacrifice and every effort for the proper care and the wise training of the organization of the Christian community itself which, while it must become increasingly a source of revolutionary thought and movement, is also the only body that can by the help and grace of God give these far-reaching movements a healthy direction and lead them to safe and happy issues.''[109]
[108] ``China's Call for a Three Years' Enterprise,'' 1903.
[109] Gibson, p. 277.
Grant that the work of evangelization must be chiefly done by Chinese preachers; there is still much for the missionary to do. Allowing for those who, on account of illness, furlough or other duties, are temporarily non-effective, 10,000 missionaries for China would not give a working average of one for every 50,000 of the population. In these circumstances, the union conference of missionaries at Kuling, August 7, 1903, was surely within reasonable bounds when, in urging the Protestant churches to celebrate in 1907 the one hundredth anniversary of the sending forth of Robert Morrison, it declared:—